Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey (website, Wikipedia) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain (the United Kingdom excluding Northern Ireland). Although other organisations have mapped Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey has the most detailed maps, and many organisations license the O.S. data products for use elsewhere. This includes Google Maps coverage of the UK for example (licensed via Teleatlas).

There is a great deal of national pride in Ordnance Survey, which has been producing beautiful maps for over a century. The landranger series of walking maps are particularly popular. Originally this was a government (crown) organisation funded and owned by the taxpayer, these days it operates a "trading fund" which must fund itself like a profit-making business. Hence the license …

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Map license

In the past the maps have all been covered by "crown copyright", and the ordnance survey set a precedent for enforcing extremely strict interpretation of "derived works". This coupled with very high license fees was a huge cause of frustration for many people. In fact it was this which gave rise to the OpenStreetMap project! (see History of OpenStreetMap)

Open Data

Ordnance Survey became a central target of open data campaigning in recent years. This pressure, and the pressure of emerging competition exerted by OpenStreetMap (as well as other neo-geo technologies such as Google Maps) has forced the government to hold an Ordnance Survey Consultation and to open up some of their data. We helped make this happen!